La demonologia in Plutarco di Cheronea e l'ermeneutica delle analogie mitiche fra Osiris e Dionysos nel De Iside et Osiride

Abstract

The aim of my report is to outline the hermeneutic strategies used by Plutarch in De Iside et Osiride to understand the mythical and symbolic analogies between Osiris’ and Dionysus’ events of death and rebirth. Indeed, Plutarch’s essay (I-II c. A. D.) attests the existence of an intercultural relationship between the Greek religion and the Egyptian one. However, while the ancient historians (Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus) clarify it as an historic event explainable with a primitive anthropological diffusionism, Plutarch interprets it as a metaphysical and theological enigma. Nonetheless, it is essential to define the phenomenological similarities between Dionysus and Osiris, renouncing to the search for historical origins of the Greek religion in Egypt. For this reason, Plutarch’s hermeneutics has great significance for the historical, religious and anthropological studies, besides philosophical. Moreover, Plutarch justifies, employing the figure of daimon, the median being of the platonic cosmology, the invariant traits between the two divinities. So, this contribute tries to illuminate how Osiris and Dionysus are part of Plutarch’s demonology. Furthermore, on the basis of Bruce Lincoln’s studies, the essay attempts to analyse one of the main similarities between Dionysus’ and Osiris’ myths, or rather the sparagmos, the dismemberment of the divinity. In this way, my report investigates the flourishing inter-religious dialogue between Greece and Egypt, which are symbolic and structural rather than historical, at least, within the philosophy of Plutarch.